ABSTRACT
A suicide occurs somewhere every day, in fact every minute. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that there are over 900,000 deaths every year from suicide—about one a minute. In 2012 suicide accounted for 1.4 per cent of all deaths worldwide, making it the fifteenth leading cause of death. In many countries, it is as high as the seventh or eighth cause of death. Suicide also occurs throughout the lifespan—it is a state of mind that can take hold if we are young, middle-aged, or older. For the ancient Greeks there was an attempt to rationalise suicide and to place considerations about suicide within the study of philosophy and within the law. Durkheim’s thesis was that every suicide could be classified into three general types—egoistic, altruistic, and anomic. Suicide has also been examined in other useful, albeit non-psychological ways, in particular in Emile Durkheim’s exhaustive study On Suicide: A Study in Sociology written in 1897.
